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December 04, 2004
Google Tech
Everyone uses Google. It is ubiquitous, just like the dial tone. You always expect that it will be there, and always expect that it will return some results of interest. Urs Hölzle, Google's VP for Engineering, was in London and ZDNet UK's Matt Loney wrote a really interesting article (even for you non-techies) about "The Magic That Makes Google Tick".
When Arthur C. Clarke said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, he was alluding to the trick of hiding the complexity of the job from the audience, or the user. Nobody hides the complexity of the job better than Google does; so long as we have a connection to the Internet, the Google search page is there day and night, every day of the year, and it is not just there, but it returns results.
I really like that Google's stated mission is to "organize the world's information", and not just as a search engine. The distinction may be lost on some, but that's clearly part of the magic. The interesting bits, for those propeller heads out there, is how they do what they do. And the answer, more common every day, is in the software.
Google's hardware is standard, no-name, failure-prone computers that any other IT department would refuse to even consider. But the thing the folks at Google realized is that there were going to be failures and that the only way to deal with them is to write software that will work around it. So, in a cluster of 2000 computers, a couple of hardware failures in a day mean nothing. They just route around it.
Their need to create software that manages the mess of computers led them to develop their own file system as well as systems management software that makes rolling out a new data center painless:
A new data centre can be up and running in under three days. "Our data centre now is like an iMac," said Schulz. "You have two cables, power and data. All you need is a truck to bring the servers in and the whole burning in, operating system install and configuration is automated."
Go read the article, it is quite fascinating.
Posted by Samer at December 4, 2004 01:30 PM
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